About

Union democracy, rank and file activism and social justice unionism (so-called USC Rank and File)

Who are we?

We are organizers in GSWOC who believe in:

What are our goals?

Transparent & Democratic Decision Making

We want more union members to join the decision-making process of anything related to themselves. We aim to increase the transparency and accessibility of the decision-making process.

We pushed for direct democracy in our union bylaw. E.g. If some people at Engineering think the wage proposal is too low, we can ask for a campus-wide vote, requesting the bargaining team not to lower the wage proposal. Other unions, University of Columbia, University of Michigan, have similar voting procedures.

Read more about Union reform in UAW and Union reform in other university

International student representation

As in Fall 2022, 51% percent of newly enrolled PhD students are international. But in the initial bargaining team, only 1 out of 15 was international. It was later increased to 2 out of 15. We want to create an inclusive and supportive union space for international students. This Reform Caucus was started by International students from the GSWOC international student committee, which no longer exists in our union.

Support marginalized workers

  • Realize promises. In 2023, the bargaining team responded to many demands of International students by saying, “It is difficult to bargain, we can fight for it as a union after this bargaining”, and “We can provide this as a union”. We listed those promises here.

  • Empower marginalized workers. When discussing about bargaining for better healthcare, people get into conversations like, “better wage can benefit everyone”, thus healthcare may be put into lower priority; When asking bargaining team why things related to International students were dropped, the answer was “to win as many core demands as possible”. We want marginalized workers to be empowered and their demands to be kept at the bargaining table till the last minute.

Change our union culture

  • Create a safe community. Many people, especially International students, are not willing to tell organizers what they think and how they feel. We want to create a safe organizing space for our people and all our organizers to truly listen. So we can really hear people.
  • Bottom-up and critical-thinking. In 2023, organizers at department-level were given tasks by bargaining team / steering committee in a top-down way. Many of our organizers collect signature like KPI (Key Performance Indicator), just ask people to sign on things with little explaination. We need more thinking in this process. People should know why.

Contact

You can email us at reform.caucus.at.usc.gswoc@proton.me

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Chat groups

We have a group on Whatsapp. 微信群，关注微信公众号 “USC GSWOC 的留学生们”。 后台回复 “入群”。

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